Balding, and with spines rather than hair; with deep-set glittering eyes and wrinkly, stretched skin covering a huge, flattened, almost alien face; with claw hands, hunched back, scrawny neck, and a hobbling but alarmingly spry gait – the larger-than-life puppet of Baba Yaga is a real treat. Manipulated with gusto and a treacly thick Scots accent by Laura Cairns, she’s the gruesome and malevolent hag-baddy of the traditional European fairytale, but this isn’t a Christmas show and we can’t be sure all will end well…

In a small but ambitious production, The Wrong Crowd (a relatively new company with a focus on storytelling and puppetry) mix traditional fairytale themes and characters with some ideas of their own to tell the story of the child-guzzling and seemingly all-seeing witch Baba Yaga’s brush with one little girl who would not be eaten. She’s Lisa, based largely on Russian fairytale protagonist Vasilisa, but having much in common as well with Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel. We can enjoy looking for moments of the story that we recognise whilst being able to appreciate where The Wrong Crowd have been inventive.

Lisa was brought up on the edge of the forest by two loving parents, but when her mother dies her father plunges into grief and she is left with only an inanimate little doll to protect her. Lisa’s lonely father marries a really disgusting stepmother with two obnoxious daughters. They’re not wicked, per se, they’re just massively irritating caricature bullies, rahs with giant blonde wigs, equally giant sunglasses, and egos to match. They bully her into going alone through the forest to Baba Yaga’s house, where she will almost certainly be eaten by the old witch. Crossing cultural contexts like this worked from an entertainment point of view – the step-family are hilarious – but detracts from the seriousness of the Baba Yaga/Lisa story by relieving the atmosphere after the mother’s tragic death. This is an observation rather than a criticism, as we are kept entranced throughout the show, but I felt that The Wrong Crowd had been building up to something really quite sinister, and that this is deliberately tempered by the introduction of the show’s more modern characters, as if to make sure it is suitable for all ages.

The set is mixed. A jumbled hummock of homely junk fronted by an old armchair cleverly allows outdoor and indoor scenes, transitions and journeys to take place. A roll-along gas fire gives Baba Yaga something to sit in front of, and casts an appropriately gloomy glow, but is a real trip hazard to the energetic cast. The whole set-up is surrounded, as per the tradition of Baba Yaga’s forest house, by a circle of skulls, giving off the intended macabre feel, but half-heartedly, as they are uniform plasticky-looking skulls, like those one might buy around Halloween.

At Baba Yaga’s house, it all gets very grim (and Grimm), with plenty of delightful guts and gore. Lisa is set a series of tasks to complete, which her little puppet-doll helps her to untangle, and to lighten the atmosphere a bit she is harangued by a funny ghost-child who was previously the prey of Baba Yaga. A trip to the afterlife where she seeks her mother is balanced in a similar way by her encounter with the officious gatekeeper, who puts her doll in a ziplock bag for safekeeping. Without this character the afterlife scene, the emotional climax of the show, would have had me in tears – perhaps this is not what The Wrong Crowd wanted.

Lisa earns Baba Yaga’s respect, and in doing so we get the faintest glimpse of the hag’s human side. There are some real depths that could be explored here, but as it is, HAG is a pleasingly ghoulish tale and The Wrong Crowd are thoroughly entertaining.